2.

The ugliest stain left by this disaster—beyond the loss of an irreproachable young woman barely out of her teens and millions of dollars in damage, both property and psychic—is the bilious stain that spread over time and still colors us. It’s a stain of narrative, of story: the collected, steady drip of untruth from the lips of small-minded busybodies—women, if I may be frank, who found a vocation in slandering strangers over steaming cups. Through their dentures they whispered predictions and slurped their chamomile tea. All geezers are certain, but these particular geezers weren’t certain that Audrey Mapes—at the time just a preschooler living in a rundown house and not yet experiencing functional, non-threatening feet—wouldn’t grow up to perform some monumental act so insensitive and selfish and evil that she would be exposed as the devil she was. They predicted that Audrey—yes, that Antichrist who drifted off to dreamland clutching a stuffed rhinoceros—would alter the world forever, causing misery, horror, and perhaps even a dangerous chemical spill or two.

These arthritic Nostrodami also added assurances that the only folks who would come out looking good after the ordeal (Aside from the victims. Of course. ) would be the ones who’d had the prescience to see it coming, those who’d warned the world even while this monster was still a sweet lily cup in a pink dress sticking out her tongue for Polaroids. Nightly, their clawed hands patted each other’s hunches before they crawled alone between tightened bed sheets to pray rosaries for one more day of lung power, one more meatloaf sandwich, one more chance to trash a child they barely knew.

The stain, of course, is that they were right. The geezers called it. That’s the sticker.

However, I hereby assert that none of these psychic busybodies, and in fact, no one on Earth—not Audrey’s half-paralyzed prophet of a mother; not her half-deaf, wannabe-inventor father; not her bulging brother or misunderstood sister—ever envisioned Audrey growing up to devour an entire city. Not even a crumb like Kal-amazoo.